Rick Santorum and the politics of fear

I’ll be honest; I get some pleasure out of watching the Pennsylvania Senate campaign. The incumbent, Rick Santorum, is perhaps best known for his outrageous comments about gay people (comparing homosexuality to bestiality) and is, to me, the epitome of what’s wrong with the radicals who’ve turned the Republican party into the party of massive deficits and bigotry.

And Santorum appears to be going down; Pennsylvania voters have had enough of him, and he can’t seem to get any traction against his opponent, State Treasurer Bob Casey. So what’s he doing now? Turning to a simple set of messages: Bob Casey helps terrorists! Vote for Casey and you’ll die!

“Bob Casey has invested Pennsylvania pension funds in companies with ties to terrorist-sponsoring states and states that engage in genocide,” Santorum said. “Bob Casey is aiding and abetting terrorism and genocide.”

The third-ranking Republican in the Senate said preventing terrorists from getting funding was an essential part of combating terrorism.

“I’m the one trying to fight this war politically and economically so we don’t have to fight it militarily, and he is asleep at the switch because he’s not doing his job,” Santorum said.

Casey replied that he has been working for months to prevent pension dollars from going to companies that do business with nations linked to terrorism, but that the Bush administration has “stonewalled” his request to release a list of such companies.

Santorum said it is not the federal government’s place to release a list.

“You have layers of folks who look at, well, you know, are we going to offend our allies? You have the State Department sticking their nose in, you might have the Commerce Department sticking their nose in. There may be all sorts of interests that come into play that can color the picture,” Santorum said.

So the federal government can’t tell us what companies are doing business with terrorists, so it falls on the doorstep of the treasurer of a medium-sized state in the northeast to sort it out.

“You’ve had some really aggressive ads,” MSNBC’s Rita Crosby said to the Pennsylvania senator, who is trailing Casey by 12 percent in the latest MSNBC-McClatchy poll.

Cosby said that “a lot of jaws dropped” at the mushroom cloud ad, which she then showed a clip from.

“North Korea, close to a nuclear missile to reach America,” a narrator says in the ad. “Yet Casey opposes deploying a missile defense system now.”

Well, what Santorum (and most Republicans) don’t like to talk about is the pretty miserable record of attempts to build missile defense systems; ever since Ronald Reagan pushed them in the 1980s, there’s been that little detail of so many of the scientists working on them telling us that they don’t work very well at this point. It’s a nice idea, but isn’t it possible that someone voting against them is doing so not because he doesn’t want to defend the country, but perhaps would like to spend defense money on something actually does that?

Here’s what I find so encouraging about this race: Santorum’s flailing doesn’t seem to be helping him. It seems that a lot of Americans, watching the mounting death toll in Iraq, years of misguided homeland security investments that leave us unable to even come up with a workable no-fly list or know what’s in containers entering the country, and the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, are realizing that the party that likes to show us pictures of Osama bin Laden whenever they’re in political trouble may not be capable of making us safer.

People will vote out of fear for a while, but it’s a very hard technique to sustain. Santorum, like some of his fellow Republicans, seems to be learning that lesson the hard way. And that’s good for the country, if not for the senator from Pennsylvania.